A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Of the numerous books publishers send me for review — be they requested by me, pitched by them, or arriving at my doorstep unsolicited — the highest percentage of them are monographs. This fact goes against the occasional sirens over the irrelevance and anachronistic nature of monographs in our digital age, with free access ( for now ) to voluminous amounts of information on buildings and architects readily available online. But books, in my opinion, are better archives than websites, offering architects a further level of control over the finished product compared to websites. It's not uncommon today to find architecture firms, no doubt driven by savvy marketing departments and PR firms, merging their brands across platforms, such that their monographs resemble their websites. But in five or ten years time, only the books will retain that expression, thereby making them important archives of architects' work and the means of presenting it. The four recently published monograph...

From the middle of March, when a family emergency put this blog on hiatus , until the middle of July, when a funeral mass was held for my dad, my life was split almost evenly between my home in New York City and my parent's home in Central Florida. The emergency in March was an incident putting my father in the hospital, and it was followed by numerous diagnoses, the need for him to go into assisted living, and eventually him going back into the hospital, where he died — peacefully, with me, my mother, and my sister at his bedside. Back in March I anticipated, even with his diagnoses, to be helping him in various capacities for a few years, not just a few months. They were difficult and taxing months that found me as relieved as saddened when he passed; the obvious pain and frustration he felt are gone, but memories of him remain and in some ways are stronger and more prevalent now than before. Over those three months, I managed to eke out a half-dozen posts on this blog: a roundup...

The most recent numbered installment of  "Book Briefs,"  the series of occasional posts featuring short first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that publishers send to me for consideration on this blog, was #48, back in December . I wasn't planning on continuing the series this year-of-doing-things-differently ( or so I thought ), but a couple of weeks ago I brought back the "Briefs"  to play around with ChatGPT , which I had been hesitant to dive into but was told by numerous people that I MUST try it. At that time I also mentioned an in-progress "Brief" with eight books — here they are. Concrete in Switzerland: Histories from the Recent Past  edited by Salvatore Aprea, Nicola Navone, Laurent Stalder and Sarah Nichols, published by EPFL Press in May 2022 ( Amazon / Bookshop ) Concrete in Switzerland is a companion publication to Beton , the exhibition held at S AM (Swiss Architecture Museum) in Basel from November 2021 to April 2022. ...

Last week I cobbled together eight books, some of which publishers had sent me more than a year ago, in an effort to write a "Better Late Than Never" installment of  "Book Briefs,"   something I had done back in April 2018 with Book Briefs #35 . But, sensing I would not be able to absorb the books quickly enough to get the post done in less than a week, I thought that revisiting that five-year-old post would be a great way of (finally) dipping into the timesaver that is AI, asking OpenAI's ChatGPT to write similar one-paragraph reviews and see what it came up with. So that's what I did. Specifically, I told ChatGPT to "Give a short, one-paragraph review of 'X Book' by Y author." Its output is featured below, in four of the six books that were part of Book Briefs #35, accompanied by my own "briefs" from 2018 and blurbs from the publishers.  How do the reviews compare, my own vs. OpenAI? My takes are certainly more personal, with f...

Two weeks ago I was in Venice for the Biennale, covering the 18th International Architecture Exhibition curated by Lesley Lokko for World-Architects . It was my first trip back to Venice since the 2018 Biennale, which was the 16th edition and was curated by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects. Like other writers outside of Europe, the interim edition, though delayed from 2020 to 2021 due the pandemic, still opened at a time when international travel was difficult. I passed on it, as many others did.  My 2018 trip yielded a pair of "book briefs"  on this blog with two handfuls of catalogs from the main exhibition, some from the national pavilions, and some on collateral events. Although a similar number of books from the current Biennale is featured below, it felt this year that print catalogs were slimmer than in years past. For instance, the national pavilions were focused more on digital than print publications, making them available via QR codes and ...